IPv6 Vyatta LAB – Part I; the LAB connections and addresses

The Lab

In this exercise we will add IPv6 into my IPv4-speaking lab network. This lab consists of four switches, eight routers and one firewall. The firewall is connected to the NIC of my host system and provides access to the real world. All the lab hosts are Virtualbox guests on my computer.

The switches in the middle are not relevant to this article and for that reason we will not go into their configurations.

Episodes in this story will be

Part I The LAB; connections and addresses
Part II OSPF as IGP
Part III BGP route reflectors and their clients
Part IV BGP routes
Part V New site via eBGP

Here is the network diagram for this lab.
(Click to enlarge)

Each link between the routers and switches represents a Virtualbox intnet, each of them being unique. (Exeption: link between FW and Cisco goes through my wlan)

Because Virtualbox does not speak IPv6 over wlan interface, I have made a tunnel from the firewall to my real world router. There is also a tunnel between R1 and FW just because it is fun to make tunnels.

The prefix for my lab routers is 2001:099:0013:004a::/64. Each router will get a globally valid loopback address from this area.

I will use also other prefixes when it is time to add “customer” sites to the mix.

The Firewall is an ubuntu server, all other routers and switches are Vyatta 6.3.

There will be also ip6tables rules on the Firewall. I might write some more on firewalling later but you can find an example of a very basic firewall setup from my previous posting about IPv6 for residential user with tunnel service.

Here are the configurations for the tunnels used to connect the Real World to the Firewall and the Firewall to R1.
Feel free to skip them if you are not intending to use tunnels. The main beef in this lab will be the dynamic routing between routers from R1 to R8.

Set up a client interface with router advertisement and advertise with BGP

Set up a client computer and test connectivity

Let’s get it started!

Check IPv6 forwarding

Vyatta routers

Vyatta 6.3 has IPv6 forwarding on by default. You can verify it with
show ipv6 forwarding

Firewall (Ubuntu server)

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Uncomment
net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1

Reboot.

Verify IPv6 connectivity between the lab routers

Go to one of them, check which interfaces are connected to other routers and give it a try:

sudo ping6 -I eth0.12 ff02::1

If and when you get replies, you can try to connect to one of those neighbors directly:
ssh fe80::a00:27ff:fe96:c448%eth0.12

Routing the LAB Prefix

I have routed the LAB prefix from the Real World (Cisco router) to my virtual lab. The routing goes in two different tunnels. You can see the commands used in static routing (Cisco, Ubuntu, Vyatta) in the tunnel examples above.

Router loopbacks

The last job in this episode is to assign each Vyatta router an address from our LAB Prefix.Let’s put the to the loopback interface.